Vertigo
Firs adamant, as always. Stream
metronome to the opus of all there is.
Late November leaves crack
gold beneath my longing,
beneath all our symphonic genius,
their perfume a possible
that still might allow us.
For now we endure
through our atonality — ice sheets
fractured, ash-strewn ruin,
cities fading into sea.
A planet moves to refute us
as I lapse from communion,
vertigo surging between the human
and that desperate taunt — wholeness.
My lungs yearn for soil, wood, lavish moss,
for ages suspended in every stone —
not the bite of a world
bowed beneath our ache —
compassion we've disfigured
until blessing became bane,
until what it does most
is undo — until all we have left
is the dissonance of a love song
that tears us from the center of all things.